More proof that Apple fanboys are removing themselves from the gene pool

Just because Apple charges you more than an iPhone’s weight in gold does not mean you should bite it to prove it is valuable.

Apparently iPhone battery biting is the latest thing which is helping to improve the gene pool by removing Apple fanboys.

According to Appleinsider, one iPhone biter caused a minor explosion at an electronics store in China.

If you look at the video you can see the man bringing an iPhone battery up to his face, then biting it, and as he removes the battery from his mouth, it explodes.

Taiwan News reported that the customer was at the store buying a replacement battery for his iPhone and that because Chinese electronics stores often carry fake Apple products, the man was probably biting it as a way to test its authenticity – because that is what biting does.

Apparently nobody was hurt and the video -- CCTV footage posted to Miaopai.com -- is nearing five million views because people just love to watch Apple fanboys suffer. Nothing wipes the smug smile off a dumb fanboy faster than having one of its batteries go up in your face.

Sadly no one was injured by the blast but it was probably the divine intervention of Steve Jobs to protect one of his followers – after all he was testing to see if it was a real iPhone approved battery and not a fake.

Apple’s worse nightmare is that the Chinese government might take steps to interfere with its flagging sales behind the bamboo curtain, but it is starting to look like its phone throttling antics might create a perfect storm.

Apple is already suffering from falling iPhone sales in China due to its high price and the fact that Chinese punters are a lot shrewder than Westerners when it comes to electronic purchases.

But now Apple’s move to throttle the power of the phone without telling users has raised the eyebrow of the powerful Chinese Shanghai Consumer Council.

The Council has asked Apple for information about the slowing of older iPhones after operating system updates. It is not being polite about it either – it wants a reply before Friday.

The query from the Shanghai Consumer Council came in response to consumer feedback that old iPhones became sluggish after upgrading the software to iOS 10.2.1, it said.

In a letter to Apple, the council demanded an explanation for the slow-down and information about what Apple planned to do to rectify the problem.

Apple acknowledged in December that it was throttling older phones for the good of customers who had older batteries. The fact it didn’t tell anyone that it was doing this had nothing to do with encouraging users to upgrade to new models. No, not at all, Apple would never do that, never, no way.

It also cut battery replacement costs and said it would change its software to show users whether their phone batteries were working well. However, it only did that in American and the UK and not China.

The Shanghai Consumer Council, a non-government organization approved by the Chinese authorities, generally it is not impressed with the way Jobs’ Mob treats its customers. In 2017 it had to deal with 2,615 complaints about Apple products and services compared with 964 complaints in 2015.

An investigation into Apple will lower customer confidence in China and rather than seeing the iPhone cash cow saved by Chinese sales, Apple could see itself having to pay out a lot of money for sales it has already made. Apple has been spending a lot of money to keep the Chinese authorities happy and it really did not need this.

Proving that people will always invest in something expensive, ephemeral and stupid

Pundi X, NEM.io Foundation and Stellar.org, have released a State of Cryptocurrency report, which claims that people would rather waste their cash on cryptocurrency than an iPhone X.

The report is supposed to show how popular cryptocurrency is but it forgot to point out that the iPhone X is as popular as the Boston Strangler and most sane people would rather spend their money on root canal work than an iPhone X.

The survey, conducted in India, Indonesia, Japan, Russia, UK, and the USA revealed that people prefer buying cryptocurrency over an iPhone. Around 70 percent of the respondents agree that most people will be using Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies in the next ten years.

The survey titled "the State of Cryptocurrency report" covers a range of respondents from 18 to 59 years old. The findings indicate the interest of cryptocurrency among the mainstream is high. Although only 8 percent of them currently own Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies, over one third (39 percent) of the respondents consider buying cryptocurrencies in the next six months.

More than 59 percent of respondents think bitcoin or cryptocurrency is digital money; 11 percent believe it is coin or a bank note; 23 percent don't know what cryptocurrency is. When asking about what they want to use cryptocurrency for, 35 percent said they use cryptocurrency for trading or investment; 35 percent said they want to spend cryptocurrency and make purchases. Twenty-seven percent of them use it as a store of value.

When asking about what the respondents will do with $1,000, 33 percent of them chose to save the money. However, 12 percent of them will spend it on cryptocurrency; 11 percent investing stock or bond; only seven percent thought an iPhone X was a good idea and six percent said they would give it to charity. Only one percent of the respondents want to use $1,000 to buy a VR headset or a drone.

Nearly half of the cryptocurrency owners have held bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies for more than six months. Seventy six percent of them made at least two transactions in the last three months. 23 percent have traded cryptocurrencies more than ten times in three months. When transacting cryptocurrency, security, privacy, and zero transaction cost are top three most important factors.

Bitcoin, Litecoin, and Ethereum are the top three cryptocurrencies

Among the people who own cryptocurrencies, 75 percent of them could spot bitcoin, 35 percent knew Litecoin, 30 percent identify Ethereum, 27 percent Ripple, 21 percent could identify Dash. More than 20 percent of them know other cryptocurrencies.

Online exchange platforms are places where people are considering buying their cryptos

Zac Cheah, CEO, and Co-founder of Pundi X said: "From this survey, we confirmed that the uptake of cryptocurrency is high and most people consider cryptocurrency a valuable asset. As the interest of owning cryptocurrency among the mainstream is growing, there are still some challenges for the mass adoption. One of them is 'how to buy and spend' issue.

"Few cryptocurrencies have already proven themselves as a purpose that benefits the average consumers more than cash does regarding financial inclusion and asset sharing but difficult for everyday transactions. We believe that this will improve as more and more innovative startups, like Pundi X, NEM and Stellar.org, are providing solutions to tackle this issue and bring them into the real economy."

Apple is facing two class-action lawsuits, filed by furious customers just days after the firm admitted to intentionally slowing down older iPhones.

According to the Chicago SunTimes, the latest suit was filed on Thursday and involves five customers from Illinois, Ohio, North Carolina, and Indiana who own models ranging from the iPhone 5 to the iPhone 7. They accuse Apple of "deceptive, moral, and unethical" practices, and claim the firm engineered iOS updates to "purposefully slow down or ‘throttle down’ the performance speeds” of the iPhone 5, iPhone 6 and iPhone 7.

An earlier lawsuit, filed in Los Angeles by Stefan Bogdanovich, claims the practice of slowing down phones causes users to suffer. His case is predominantly focused on the iPhone 7. Bogdanovich believes that Apple intentionally slowed down older iPhones to force people to upgrade, though Apple has said this isn't the reason.

Apple is not saying anything of course.

For those who came in late, iPhone owners have long noticed that their devices seem to slow down over time and that replacing the battery seems to boost performance.

Apple admitted it did slow down phones as part of a new power management feature but insisted it had nothing to do with forcing people to upgrade or buy a new battery.

However, the fact that no other company does this sort of thing and Apple failed to mention what it was doing makes most sane people smell a rat.

The average iPhone user would have just seen the phone behaving oddly and thought that either it was going to cost a lot to fix or it was a sign from the great spirit of Steve Jobs that they needed to upgrade.

After the iPhone X received a good kicking in China, when Apple made the mistake of trying to jack the price up to “silly money” levels, Chinese phone manufacturers are considering taking the fight to Apple.

Huawei and Xiaomi have carried the scalp of Apple’s iPhone X to US wireless operators and told them while Apple is an idiot in the US they can do the same thing that they did to the fruity cargo cult in China.

The handset makers are negotiating with carriers including AT&T, and Verizon Communications and while things are still fluid it’s possible nothing will come of it. But the fact that they think they can have a shot at it is a sign of how precarious Apple’s worldwide hold has become.

Apple is the leading smartphone maker in the US. The nation which elected Donald Trump to be its ruler, can't apparently get enough of them. However, some of that success is due to the high support from carriers, which used to subsidise its expensive iPhones and lowered the upfront price for customers.

However, these subsidies or discounts have gone away, as carriers moved to phone financing that spreads costs over two years and there is no real reason to keep propping up Apple anymore.

In fact, US carriers are cutting subsidies, so consumers increasingly pay full price, in some cases more than $1,000, for high-end phones.

Chinese rivals often sell phones far cheaper. Huawei’s Mate 9 sells on Amazon.com for $400. If you stuck an Apple logo on the back of them, most Apple fanboys would not spot the difference.

Huawei has already tried selling its flagship Mate 9 phone in the US via e-commerce websites like Amazon.com, but working directly with wireless partners would give China’s No. 1 phone maker a more comprehensive presence across the US through retail stores, carrier websites and TV commercials.

Huawei is in talks to sell a flagship line via US carriers, but the Chinese company also plans to sell the Mate 10 device through e-commerce channels.

Xiaomi executive Wang Xiang said the firm aims to roll out phones in the US within two years, but noted that the process of working through specifications with each carrier is time consuming.

Xiaomi is also considering opening retail stores in the US to build its brand and sell its fitness trackers, thermostats and vacuum cleaners before a phone launch, he said. Those products are already sold online in the US by Verizon and AT&T.

All this is happening as Apple sales in China have been falling. Apple shipped 8.8 million iPhones in the third quarter in China, ranking behind Huawei, Oppo, Vivo, and Xiaomi, IDC estimated last month. That gives Apple just under eight percent of the Chinese smartphone market, compared with over 33 percent for Huawei and Xiaomi combined, according to IDC’s report.

The Tame Apple Press cheered a slight spike in sales in China last quarter saying it was a return to the good old days. However saner heads disagreed.

Mo Jia, an analyst with researcher Canalys warned that Apple’s growth this quarter is only temporary. “The hefty price of iPhone X is going to hurt sales in China.”

The fruity cargo cult Apple appears to have come up with a novel scheme to force Apple fanboys who refuse to buy a new phone every year to buy one anyway.

A Reddit post from an iPhone 6s owner reported that a battery replacement significantly increased the device's performance running iOS 11. The ensuing discussion thread, also picked up by readers in the MacRumors forum, seems to indicate that Apple intentionally slows down older phones to retain a full day's charge if the battery has degraded.

According to TeckFire, the author of the original Reddit post, its iPhone had been slow after updating to iOS 11, especially compared to his or her brother's iPhone 6 Plus, so decided to do some research with GeekBench and battery life apps, and ended up replacing the battery.

“Wear level was somewhere around 20 percent on my old battery. I did a Geekbench score, and found I was getting 1466 Single and 2512 Multi. This did not change whether I had low power mode on or off. After changing my battery, I did another test to check if it was just a placebo. Nope. 2526 Single and 4456 Multi. From what I can tell, Apple slows down phones when their battery gets too low, so you can still have a full days charge.”

Apple launched a repair program for iPhone 6s owners after some users reported their devices were unexpectedly shutting down. Apple said the problem was down to a manufacturing issue affecting a "very small" number of iPhone 6s devices, and offered battery replacements free of charge to owners of devices within a limited serial number range.

Then Jobs' Mob released iOS 10.2.1 and said the update resulted in an 80 percent reduction in unexpected shutdowns on iPhone 6s and a 70 percent reduction on iPhone 6 devices.

Apple claimed that this was because it was fixing a more widely reported bug caused by uneven power delivery from older batteries, and claimed it was separate from the manufacturing fault that had caused it to recall a select number of iPhone 6s devices.

However, Apple fanboys on this Reddit thread, speculates that the two shutdown issues are related. In other words, Apple's fix involves dynamically throttling the phones' maximum clock speeds relative to battery output (voltage), to prevent them from drawing too much power and shutting down.

This is not the first report that replacing the iPhone 6 battery can improve the performance. But the idea of Apple is intentionally throttling the performance of older devices is heresy. After all the only thing Apple has to gain from such action is to force users to upgrade to its latest range of more expensive phones and that is not a motive.

Not all Apple fanboys are hacked off. Some of the comments dub the claims “fake news” and the Geekbench scores as “fake science”.

The fruity-cargo cult Apple has no interest in peddling its rich toys to US black areas and appears to have segregated its distribution, according to a new study.

According to the Outline, 93 percent of Apple stores are built in white areas, presumably because it does not think black communities can afford their expensive products.

For example, New York's northernmost borough is the city's most diverse, has the lowest income per household, and is the only borough without an Apple Store.

Nationally 251 of the 270 stores, or 93 percent, are located in majority white ZIP codes. Of the 19 that are not found in majority white ZIP codes, eight are in ZIP codes where whites are still the largest racial bloc.

The positioning of stores is not based on population numbers. Garden City, New York, a city with a population of around 22,000 that is 94 percent white, has an Apple Store. Lake Grove, New York, which has a population of approximately 11,000 and is 89 percent white, has an Apple Store. By comparison, nearly 1.5 million people live in the densely-packed Bronx, which is only 21 percent white.

Bronx residents must travel either north to Ridge Hill or down to the Upper East Side to get to an Apple store.

Apple is refusing to say what criteria it uses to decide where new stores are built or the demographics of its stores' neighbourhoods, and it might merely be financial. USC Marshall School of Business professor Ira Kalb pointed out the company is "going after the high-end of the market, so their store location choices typically go after areas that are considered upscale".

Being a black person in the US is pretty terrible at the best of times, at least they do not have to put up with a temple to the cult of Apple in their neighbourhood – even if it is probably not a good sign if a corporation appears only interested in selling to whites.

However, Apple does have a problem with institutionalised racism. On paper, 11 percent of its new hires are black and nine percent of the entire company. This is higher than many tech companies but when you consider most of the jobs are low paying retail work the figure is less than stellar. Eighteen percent of Apple’s retail employee base is Hispanic, 13 percent are black, seven percent are Asian and 57 percent are white.

Apple appears to be cracking down on racism within its organisation. Apple’s vice president of inclusion and diversity, Denise Young Smith who once thought hiring 12 white, blond, blue-eyed men could actually be seen as promoting diversity, has been replaced.

For those of you with short memories, Young Smith told business leaders: “There can be 12 white, blue-eyed, blond men in a room and they’re going to be diverse, too, because they’re going to bring a different life experience and life perspective to the conversation.”

Even when Apple finally twigged that its chief of diversity did not know what the word “diversity” meant, it quietly replaced her with Christie Smith who is a blond blue eyed white woman. Yeah, that will sort out the problem.

Fruity tax dodging cargo cult Apple is continuing to keep its dying cash-cow on life support with two screens.

KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo has told the world he expects to see two new full screen iPhones next year – one will have a 6.5-inch OLED display, essentially making it a Plus version of the iPhone X; and the other will have a 6.1-inch LCD display, likely making it more like a full screen version of the current Plus-sized iPhone.

Kuo writes that Apple is hoping to “satisfy various needs of the high-end market” by expanding its full-screen product line.

At the high end will be the 6.5-inch OLED iPhone; beneath that will be an updated version of the 5.8-inch OLED iPhone X; and finally, the 6.1-inch LCD iPhone will sit below both of them.

Kuo predicts that the 6.1-inch phone will be priced somewhere between $649 to $749 and be set apart by having a lower res screen resolution.

However while we think $749 is too expensive for an iPhone, the Tame Press thinks that the figure is far too cheap. Especially as they just spent $1,200 for the iPhone X. Instead of thinking that Kuo might have got his pricing figures wrong, they believe that Apple is going to become “more competitive” when it comes to pricing.

Others are a little more reasonable and think that Kuo might be right when it comes to the screen, but Apple is unlikely to change its “charge the earth for bugger all” strategy while Apple fanboys still buy their goods.

The fruity cargo cult Apple’s iOS operating system has a natty feature which allows spooks to turn on your phone so they can see what you are doing.

Whenever you give iPhone apps permission to access your camera, the app can surreptitiously take pictures and videos of you as long as the app is in the foreground.

Apparently if a random app asks you for permission to access your camera it will take photos and videos even if you are unaware of it.

Felix Krause, who recently warned of the danger of malicious iPhone password popups, wrote a blog post as a sort of PSA for iPhone users. Krause created a test app as a proof-of-concept.

"It's something most people have no idea about, as they think the camera is only being used if they see the camera content or a LED is blinking", Krause told Motherboard.

Motherboard went out of its way to point out that it was a feature not a bug and that Krause currently works at Google and so this is probably an evil plot by the makers of Android to run down their favourite, super cool, iPhone.

However the Motherboard writer Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai had to admit that Krause’s created a custom app called "watch.user" when installed on his beloved iPhone took pictures of him while he was simply scrolling through it, and it was even running a hidden facial recognition engine.

“Again, this is not a bug or something you should be too worried about. But it's good to be aware of how much power you're giving apps when you grant them access to your iPhone's cameras”, Franceschi-Bicchierai reassured his fellow Apple fanboys for the third time in a single story.

Apple’s software skills continue to sink to new lows – now it can’t summon up enough of a skills base to write a calculator programmer which can actually add up.

The buggy iOS 11 has provided Apple fanboys with wonderful features like terrible battery life, app crashes and screen freezes, but now it seems that there is a calculator bug.

The calculator app has a weird problem that causes simple operations to go completely wrong, and it appears to be because of the stupid button animations implemented by Apple.

If you are unfortunate enough to be using iOS 11, you can replicate the bug by opening the calculator app and type quickly 1 + 2 + 3. The result should be either 23 or 24, depending on how it’s being replicated on your device.

The bug is related to the animation of the four numeric operators and it does not apply to digits. While some experienced devs said on Reddit that this animation is too long and isn’t stopped by pressing a digit, so the calculator ignores some taps. Others believe the animation just gets stuck after clicking an operator.

In other words, in the name of super-cool design, Apple programmers borked one of the most simple computer functions on a phone.

The Tame Apple Press says that there is nothing to worry about as this particular bug will not affect the performance of your phone. However, you should not use the calculator if you want to be certain that it will add up numbers. Seems fair enough – spend $1,000 on a phone which is too stupid to add up your shopping list.

What is clear is that for all the money Apple expects its fanboys to spend on its shiny toys, it is not being spent on doing a basic QA.

Apple is famous for being unable to write programs that many students have to write in high school. Its best effort included clock software which could not handle a daylight savings change or self-update when it crossed a time zone. Clearly Apple developers never had Dr Bins for a computer studies teacher in sixth form – they would be able to write such code in Basic or Pascal or be too terrified to come to work.